The Keepers of the House

by Shirley Ann Grau

Those long summer evenings, after supper when he sat in the new gazebo with his daughter, fanning gently at the gathering mosquitoes, he wondered about it. Abigail was reading to him. She had come home from school with a passionate desire to read poetry aloud to someone; alone would not do any more. She had a teacher, she told her father, who said it was absolutely the only way to appreciate the full quality of the sound. This particular evening she was reading Paradise Lost, and he was not listening. He never listened. He heard the gentle tones of her voice in the same way he heard the buzzing of the mosquitoes and the louder thumping of the beetles as they bumbled their way along, the whizzing sound of the swifts’ wings as they fed on them, the deeper pumping of the owls’ wings as they began to move. The tree frogs and the bullfrogs. The locusts and the crickets. He heard them all and he heard none of them. They were as vague and misty, as remote as the western sky with its evening star swimming into view through the pink haze.